


Shiny Golden Wire

by SilverDagger



Series: Miscellany and Mini-fic [1]
Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Drabbles, Gen, old stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-24
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 23:21:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 2,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4643862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Moments in the lives of Avalanche and Shinra, past, present, and future.</p><p>A collection of FFVII drabbles and ficlets, previously posted on other communities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prometheus (Jessie)

Dawn beneath the Plate is artificial, overhead lights blinking and stuttering from dim to bright.

Night, too, is false, but softer: darkness lit by muted, smoky green and amber. Shinra doesn't pay for that light. Most is stolen, some purchased honestly. The rest is true fire. Jessie remembers gathering newspapers as a kid, cardboard, anything that would burn - Shinra doesn't pay for heat, either. Only thing to do back then was hold tight, wait for morning. Sun through clouds, though, never did see that.

Doesn't bother her much. She's got gelignite, wire, steady hands. Only fire she needs, she makes.


	2. Mirror Image (Sephiroth, Aeris)

The Cetra girl smiles at him.

Sephiroth doesn't like people who smile. It's an animal gesture, bared teeth and threat. _Hojo_ smiles at him, and so does the President, and he can't look at either man without wondering what their blood would look like on the walls. But they've got this one in a holding cell, like him - transparent walls, so they can see through to everything you're doing. Locks from the outside in. So he doesn't smile back, but he nods when he sees her, fractionally.

When the war comes, he knows they'll be on the same side.


	3. Turning Point (Elmyra, Aeris)

The girl is sitting on the bed when Elmyra walks in, kicking her heels and staring at the door.

"You're not my mother," she says. She looks too controlled for her age, too calm, and she observes her surroundings with nothing but the slightest edge of scorn. And Elmyra wonders, obscurely, if she ought to be frightened of this creature she brought into her home. But that's ridiculous, no matter what she sees reflected in those fathomless green eyes. Aeris is a child, and hurting.

"No," she says. "I'm not. But I'm here anyway."


	4. Portents (Aeris)

Aeris is there to see the reactor go up that night, walking alone beneath the pall of neon, her arms full of flowers. She's there to see that ascending cloud of fire, and feel the tremor it sends down deep through the Planet and up again through the soles of her boots, and she feels again the tidal pull of an old, indefinable dread - not because there's anything worth fearing in earth or in fire, but because she can sense the beginnings of a change in the silence that follows, and time is already slipping too quickly through her hands.


	5. Fortune (Reeve)

Reeve sips jasmine, smiling at his own indulgence, this game carried too long past the end of childhood. He knows it isn't possible to tell the future - but late at night, rationality means little, and divination at its root has always been savage: the roll of bones, rising smoke from a sacrificial pyre.

He raises the cup in a solitary mock salute - _to Midgar, city of dreams_ \- and drains the cooling tea down to the dregs. Bitterness fading on his tongue, he peers into the empty cup, adjusts his reading glasses, and frowns at the story he sees written there.


	6. Lacunae (Cloud)

Beneath the air-conditioned, corporate cleanliness, there's something about the Shinra building that smells _wrong_.

Barret and Tifa don't seem to notice it, with their unaltered human senses, or maybe they just don't care. But Cloud can taste it with every breath - that antiseptic, chemical smell that gets into the walls and floor of a place, the metallic tinge of refined mako. It never bothered him much when they did the infusions back then, hooked him up and pumped the stuff straight into his veins, let it change him from the inside out. It bothers him now.

He can't remember why.


	7. Inheritance (Rufus)

This city belongs to him, now.

There's work to be done, of course. Accounts to tally, and to terminate. His father's empire was corrupt, poorly controlled, but Rufus runs a tighter ship. He brushes a hand along the lapels of his jacket, and thinks of Dark Nation's dying cry. The beast's blood has soaked into the cloth. A loyal monster, to the end.

The chopper flies low over lights that shine like dragon's gold, and he falls back in his seat, let's weakness overtake him. It doesn't matter. All of this, he owns. It's what he's always wanted.

Isn't it?


	8. Haunted Places (Rude and Reno)

Rude frowns, staring out across the jagged discontinuity between concrete and empty air, where the upper city ends and what's left of Sector Seven begins.

"Ghosts," he says, looking sidelong at Reno.

"'s what they say."

"You believe it?"

Reno shrugs, and pitches another empty bottle over the edge. Lot of people died down there, he knows. Lot of bodies in that tangle of twisted girders and scrap metal, in among the traces of graffiti and creeping vines. It oughta scare him, maybe.

Ghosts. Fuck 'em. He took the bastards down once, he can do it again.


	9. Time Off (Rude and Reno)

Reno tilts back his chair, smiles lazily and rests his feet on the pristine table, because hell, what's the point of a vacation if you can't piss someone off on company time? But the beer is good here, the whiskey's better, and the company... they're smart enough to stay away.

And then there's that impassive bastard Rude, matching him drink for drink and never cracking a smile. Reno's not much for overthinking things, never has been. Enough to get you killed, in a job like theirs. But silence is always easier when you're drunk, and right now? There's nothing better.


	10. Roots and Branches (Rude)

It's a plain building, low to the ground. A tree out front that doesn't look too healthy, and a playground with a couple kids who don't look too healthy either.

Rude knows he was here because Shinra has the paperwork, filed away neatly somewhere and ignored, but not much looks familiar. He donates money anyway, because what the hell else is he gonna spend it on, beer?

Yeah, beer, Reno would say. Fuck that softhearted bullshit. Rude mostly agrees.

Except.

He clawed his way out, blood under his nails. And fuck guilt too, but -

Maybe those sickly brats'll do better.


	11. Wanderers (Aeris, Nanaki)

It's sunset, cool enough to breathe easy, and Aeris watches the others build a fire in the Canyon's center. She'll join them later. Now, the Planet's voice is louder than human conversation, and she crumbles red earth between her fingers, looking away from a sky too vast for comfort. This isn't Midgar's dying perimeter; there's life here, perfectly adapted to the economy of survival. 

Nanaki pads up beside her, sits with a canine huff. 

"Good to be back?" she asks. He's silent. Can't be easy, returning only to leave again. 

Midgar's behind her now. She wonders if she misses it.


	12. Into the Woods (Aeris)

The Sleeping Forest is beautiful.

It's a storybook land, like she'd read about curled on Elmyra's lap in a city of rust and wires, never believing such places could really exist. Now, ferns brush her ankles as she moves between pale trees, and spiderwebs catch in her hair. No birds call from the branches, no squirrels scatter, and every step, the silence settles deeper. There are bones in this earth, she knows. Under her feet, beneath twisting roots, lies the memory of giants.

Perhaps, she thinks, one day the earth will enfold her too, and keep her bones for centuries.


	13. Deflagration (Tifa, Barret)

There's different names for it. Meteorfall. Ascension. In Nibelheim, it's Independence, and Tifa has heard Avalanche Day in Corel. Yuffie still calls it _The Day We Didn't All Die Screaming_ , and sends out annual cards. Tifa has one on the mantelpiece, pride of place next to a mastered Cure materia and a vase of tiny yellow flowers.

None of them talk or think much about it, and when the day rolls around again, it's almost always a surprise. Another year past, time that blooms and fades like the day's pyrotechnics, leaves only ash.

Apocalypse averted. Life, despite everything, goes on.

*

"Fireworks tonight?"

"Kid loves 'em." Barret smiles fondly, and Tifa remembers the festivities last year, Marlene shrieking with delight. He doesn't like fireworks much himself, Barret. After the mines, he told her, after the reactors, sudden noise and combustion never felt safe, no matter how distant.

Truth is, Tifa doesn't like 'em either. They don't bother her, it's just... they're pretty, they're incandescent, and then they're _gone_. She prefers permanence. But it's tradition - got to celebrate by blowing _something_ up.

"Just like old times," she says, punching his arm lightly.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "But better."


	14. Counting Stars (Cloud, Tifa, Barret, Cid, Aeris)

When Cloud sets out that day, down the mountain with all his belongings on his back, he knows where he's going and he knows why.

He won't cut ties - he plans on visiting, after he makes the cut, writing postcards from Costa, sending a SOLDIER's paycheck home to a mom who won't need to worry any longer - but he'll be different, transformed from the inside out into a stranger, a man with nothing of the small town left about him.

Cloud lifts his face to the wind, grinning, thinks of city lights like stars in the dark of the valley and knows that everything will be better soon.

.

Tifa spends her days mixing drinks glasses behind Seventh Heaven's counter, listening to the lives and lies of others.

Surprising how much you learn about people, tending bar - some of it useful for the cause, most of it a tangle of missed chances and little triumphs, lost loves, frustrated ambitions.

She learns the names of her customers, knows their faces: punks and criminals, the young ones with stars in their eyes, the old ones who drink for the same reason Tifa fights - because doing anything else would be surrender.

.

Cid was a Midgar brat with a smart mouth, big dreams, always knew what he wanted - and sitting on the porch in a sleepy town, watching the rocket slowly tilt earthward on its rusting gantry, he knows exactly what got in his way.

It's not until they're up above the atmosphere and he sees Shera look out the window, staring into all that emptiness, that he realizes the truth - she's been countin' stars for as long as he has, longer maybe. She killed her own dream too, just to keep him safe.

.

Barret used to dream about making it big. He remembers that, him and Dyne lying on the roof back in Corel, looking up at the night sky and talking about what it would be like if things were different: no money, no worries, no slow-killing their lungs in the mines like their fathers and grandfathers all the way back.

Can't see no stars in Midgar, with the Plate stretching above them, blocking out the sky - that's why he's gonna bring that whole thing down.

.

Aeris spends her life keeping her head down, counts coins and tends her flowers with one eye always on the nearest exit, and spends her days looking to the earth, not the skies. It's not until she's outside the city limits for the first time in her life that she looks up into the darkness, and it really hits her how big the universe is, how many places she has yet to see before she dies.

It's not until she steps alone into a different city that it really hits her that she isn't going to, not before she dies or after, but that doesn't matter because there's always more than one way out; she walks toward the altar with her head held high, and the light from the cracks in the ceiling reflected on still waters looks almost like stars.


	15. Lifelines (Cid)

First time Cid Highwind ever tastes tea, he's just a dumbass kid, and his plane is down in the hills of Wutai, behind enemy lines.

It's weak, watery stuff, boiled in a tin kettle over a low fire, and frankly, it tastes like shit. But it's damn cold out there and getting colder, and he needs to save his cigarettes, and there are _noises_ in those trees - skittering sounds that are probably just animals, but don't really sound like animals should.

Not that he's scared or nothin'. But he's not stupid enough to fall asleep, and caffeine helps. Tea helps.

*

Some things change. Some things don't.

He stops being a pilot - except he _never_ stops being a pilot - and starts being a captain, with dumbass kids like he was jumping to attention whenever he snaps his fingers, and somewhere along the line, he starts to like that damn standard-issue Shinra tea.

"Long as you got this shit," he says, dumping three spoons of sugar into a cracked mug, "you know you ain't dead yet."

The trainee pilot gives him a look like he's going senile at twenty-five, and he laughs, feeling old.

"You'll figure it out, kid. Eventually."

*

He comes back, and the war is over. He comes back, and it's almost like the war never happened at all.

First paycheck he collects, he buys himself a real kettle, cast iron, and he buys himself some real goddamn tea. It's good stuff. Doesn't need to be seventy percent sugar to be palatable.

Things change. He gets used to being a captain, an engineer, setting his sights higher. But he never does forget the sky above the Wutai mountains, all that distance, and he never forgets the taste of that Shinra shit, either. Some days, he almost misses it.


	16. Shiny Golden Wire (Cloud, Barret, Tifa, Aeris, Nanaki)

When Cloud looks up through the smog and steam of Wall Market, he can see the rift in the Plate above him, the twisted wreck and the dark beyond. Collateral damage. That's all it is. Shinra's never shied away from a bit of collateral damage.

When he promised himself earlier that he wouldn't care about this, back in Seventh Heaven's run-down barroom with the jukebox playing tinny jazz and Tifa scrubbing glasses with a lost look in her eyes, it hadn't seemed like much of a promise. He hadn't cared.

He remembers other, older casualties, and wonders when that changed.

*

Barret's never regretted the gun graft, doesn't think he ever will, but trying to lift your own weight arm over arm's no easy task when your right arm is amputated just below the joint. He loops his elbow around a listing girder, checks weight and balance, swings his good arm up to grasp for a handhold and doesn't look down.

Not much to hold onto up here. Just a wire, just a fucking tenuous thread and the chasm beneath - but Marlene is safe, and he ain't dead yet. And neither is AVALANCHE.

His hand closes around metal, and he climbs.

*

There is no wind down here, not like up the mountain - no black jagged rock or thin air, no storms. Just corroding iron and fraying cables beneath her hands, making her thankful for her gloves and her instincts, and ground that shifts unexpectedly underfoot. She'd grown up climbing, and never thought she might need to use those skills to scale a mountain of debris. Never occurred to her why she might need to.

 _A golden wire of hope,_ she thinks, hauling herself over the final ledge, looking up and up. _We'll get you back. And then we'll make them bleed_.

*

She's been here before.

She won't be back, though, after she leaves again. She doesn't know how she knows that, but she does: this is the last time. Doesn't make it easier now, with these white walls closing in.

The beast in the cell beside her lashes his tale, agitated, growling low. A dangerous-looking creature, red coat marked by scars, fangs bared in warning - but it's fear, she thinks, not rage. Aeris understands fear. And she moves closer, presses her hands to the steel mesh that separates them.

"Shh," she whispers. "Be patient. I promise I'll get you out."

*

Nanaki has long since ceased pacing the confines of his prison. He knows the dimensions of this cell, the stale scent of filtered air and the acrid sting of mako that circulates now in his veins. He has begun to wonder on bad days if that is all he has ever known, and all he ever will.

But in dreams he sees canyons that stretch for miles, air that wavers in the heat and sun that burns the red earth clean. He remembers these things. Surely that means they must be real.

_Be patient. All things must someday end._

Or change.


End file.
